This post was originally part of a 3-piece post including What’s On Your Plate, Word of the Year, and What’s on Your Bookshelf.

All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake

Historian Tiya Miles weaves threads of fiction and nonfiction in a beautifully written, poetic reflection on Ashley’s Sack, a historical artifact of a mother’s gift to her nine-year-old daughter as she was sold away during slavery. (That very sentence makes me want to weep – that such a thing could have ever been a reality.) Offering tidbits of recorded history with imaginings of what may have happened to Ashley, her mother, and her sack, Miles presents the horrors of treating humans as property while uplifting the hope and strength of those enslaved—particularly enslaved Black women.

A poignant, heavy – but MUST READ book if you want to better understand the stark realities of what would be thought unimaginable evil if we didn’t know it were actually true.

Bedrock Faith: a novel

I finally picked up and read this 2021 One Book, One Chicago novel in 2022. Eric Charles May invites the reader into the lives, loves, and mayhem that occurs in a middle-class Black neighborhood on the far south side of Chicago in 1993 when a once troubled youth, now released from prison returns to bring them all into The Light. The story is peppered with vivid descriptions of the homes, wonderfully realistic and complex characters, and questions of faith, religion, and the power of the human spirit.